tickets

Songkick claims to be the biggest concert database in the world with information on more than a million past and future events. It combines a simple method of finding where your favourite musicians are playing with an invitation to join the Songkick community and share your experience of music with other fans. Wherever your favourite musicians are playing live you can find them by typing in their name for a list of international gigs.

There’s no need to be a member to get information on upcoming concerts, but those who join can also fill in details of gigs they’ve been to in the past. Other members can click ‘I was there’ and the database turns into a social network where participants can share photos, videos and reviews of each event. For future concerts members can click ‘I’m going’ and see how many other Songkickers will be there, so they could find a group of friends to go with.

Songkick’s extra features help members to track the music they like with calendar alerts for artists, venues and festivals. They can also see which of their friends are going to a concert and get together. There’s a Songkick plug-in to import up to 50 favourite artists, and once members choose a concert it’s possible to find the best value tickets via a ticket aggregator using the inventory from 29 different ticket vendors.

This is an attractive and easy-to-use site that also provides networking for members and seems to be attempting to provide all the features its target audience would require. Not much wonder it’s already proving one of the most successful London startups. I couldn’t fault it and teenagers using it should already be aware of the caution needed in meeting up with online friends at events like this.